When No
Orchids for Miss Blandish premiered in London in 1948, it created controversy
that extended all the way to British Parliament. The Monthly Film Bulletin called the movie “the most sickening
exhibition of brutality, perversion and sex ever shown on a cinema screen.” The Saturday Pictorial called it “a
piece of nauseating muck.” The Observer’s
reviewer wrote: “This film has all the morals of an alley cat and the sweetness
of a sewer.” Some politicians were also offended. The Parliamentary Secretary
to the Ministry of Food said that the film “was likely to pervert the minds of
the British people.” Eventually, the British Board of Film Censors was
compelled to offer an apology for approving the film’s production.

Attempts to release the movie in the United
States by distributor Richard Gordon were met with threats by the New York
Censor Board as well as the Customs Department to confiscate it. Gordon had to
bring the movie into the country through New Orleans but it would still take three
years of bargaining and the removal of 12 minutes of objectionable scenes to
obtain approval for exhibition. Nevertheless, the edited version was still greeted
with harsh reviews. Time called it,
“ludicrous claptrap from a claptrap novel.” The
New York Times chastised it as “an awkward attempt on the part of the English
to imitate Hollywood’s gangster formula.”

The critical disdain has never stopped. In
the multi-volume reference work, The
Motion PictureGuide,Jay Robert Nash and Stanley Ralph Ross
write “This a sick exercise in sadism (and) is about as wretched as they come.”
The annual Halliwell’sFilm Guide summarizes the movie as “hilariously
awful (and) one of the worst films ever made.”

The movie is based upon the 1939 novel of the
same name by British author James Hadley Chase that was called everything from pulp
trash to borderline pornography. When it was published in America three years
later, it received equally terrible reviews with many critics accusing the
author of plagiarizing William Faulkner’s 1931 novel, Sanctuary. The novel concerns the daughter of a wealthy Kansas City
businessman who is kidnapped by the notorious Grisson gang, led my Ma Grisson
and her psychopathic son, Slim; she is subsequently subjected to repeated rapes
by Slim while in a drug-induced stupor. (Note: when Robert Aldrich directed his
film version in 1971, he changed the name from Grisson to Grissom for The Grissom Gang.)

After several attempts to film the novel were
aborted by the BFFC, producer George Minter signed playwright St. John Clowes
to write a script that eventually was approved. The script eliminated much of the
novel’s sleaze but, as it turned out, not enough. Clowes, who had directed one
previous film, also signed on to direct. Casting proved to be difficult because
of the novel’s notoriety. After several Hollywood actresses refused the role,
Minter signed British actress Linden Travers who had played Miss Blandish in
the London stage version which had been a huge success in 1942. (As in the
novel, Miss Blandish’s first name is never revealed.) For the role of Slim
Grisson, Minter hired Hollywood actor Jack La Rue whose most famous role had ironically
been as the gangster/rapist called Trigger in The Story of Temple Drake, the 1933 film version of Sanctuary. Due to that film’s infamy, La
Rue’s career had subsequently stalled and he had been reduced to playing bit
parts until he accepted the role of Slim Grisson.

Clowes changes the setting of the story from
1930s Kansas City to 1940s New York City and converts the sordid tale into a
love story. Slim Grisson is still a killer but is also a sensitive gangster who
has always had a torch for the heiress. Instead of being held prisoner and
sexually abused, Miss Blandish chooses to voluntarily stay with her captor and
become his lover. The other members of the Grisson gang remain murderous thugs who
become furious over Slim’s refusal to demand ransom from his paramour’s father;
this will lead to carnage within the gang. Mr. Blandish also undergoes some
changes from a cold patriarch to a caring father who longs for his daughter’s
return. Dave Fenner, the private detective of the novel, becomes a
wise-cracking reporter who discovers the culpability of the Grisson gang and
becomes their target. Meanwhile, the police are determined to end the gang’s
reign of terror. With all of these forces against their alliance, the lovers’
plan to escape to another country is doomed.

Regarding the controversy, the film contains numerous
scenes of depraved criminals committing acts of brutality along with periodic
scenes of suggestive sexual interludes among various characters. What particularly
shocked British gentry was the suggestion that an aristocratic woman would not
only voluntarily elect to have a sexual relationship with someone beneath her
social class but would actually enjoy it. This was simply unacceptable. Also, the
film’s depiction of a gang of killers with no redeeming qualities angered
social reformers who believed that lawbreakers were products of their
environment and could be rehabilitated if taken away from such milieu. Furthermore,
many British film critics disapproved of the popularity of Hollywood gangster
films and resented the idea of a home-based film emulating this despised genre.
Thus, the condemnation of the film was at least in part due to factors other
than the quality of the movie.